Kirk Wakefield is Executive Director of the S3 Program, publisher & editor of the Baylor S3 Report, author of Team Sports Marketing (www.teamsportsmarketing.com), and is the Edwin W. Streetman Professor of Retail Marketing at Baylor University.

Thanks to you, the growth in readership and membership at the S3 Report has been exceptional. Let’s start with who we are and then how we’ve grown.

Who are we?

The S3 Report launched in January 2013 with a following of no more than 75 members of our S3 Board and staff who write for us. Within four months, we had 300 registered members (up 400%). Starting from scratch in January (visits = 0), where has your support taken us?

4,506 unique visitors, 7,174 total visits, and 37,625 page views since January 1.

1,792 unique visitors since May 1:

67% new visitors

Over 98% stay on the site for 3 minutes and view over 5 articles each visit.

How did we get here? You.

First, we started with influencers. Executives from leading teams in every league and among major sports advertisers from the Baylor S3 Advisory Board provided the foundation as our writers.

Second, more influencers like you joined the community via social media. With the help of the first 75 influencers and their followers, traffic was generated primarily through Twitter referrals. Over half of our traffic (51.3%) comes from referrals via social media and other websites, with another 16% from search traffic and 30% direct traffic to the site.

Breaking down the referrals with Google Analytics, we can see how most new visitors get here: